


Sanguine

by TheNarator



Series: Honor Among Thieves [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Kidnapping, Multi, Multiple Deaths, People blowing up, certainly they're going to great lengths to keep him around, cisco as a member of the snart gang, evil!cisco, he may or may not be sleeping with all of them, make of that what you will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 05:46:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5955936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNarator/pseuds/TheNarator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cisco, or Psychotech as he goes by these days, is a member of the Snart Gang and gets injured on a heist. The rest of them hold up a private hospital to get him the best possible medical attention. </p><p>It really is impossible to work with Cisco without becoming very, very fond of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sanguine

There really wasn’t any line of work that living in a city full of metahumans didn’t make more dangerous.

If you worked for the city, in any capacity, you might as well just kiss any hope of getting to an age to collect your pension goodbye. If you owned any kind of shop that operated at street level you were virtually guaranteed to have some superpowered battle blow out your front window every other week. Office jobs? Good luck getting to work with the bus routes being constantly interrupted, and indeed vehicles of any kind were a bit inadvisable when you had people running around who could lift them up and toss them across town.

Working in a hospital was certainly an _adventure_  in Central City, but generally speaking you were treating the victims of various metahumans, not the metas themselves. Of course, not all of the supervillains in the city were metas, and you had plenty of ordinary wackos running around in costumes just because they thought they could get away with it in all the chaos. These, however, tended to avoid hospitals, chiefly because it was easier for the cops to find them there. You had to give information, in a hospital. People asked questions.

That issue was eliminated, however, if you just took over the entire hospital.

“This is how it’s going to go,” said Captain Cold, pointing his weapon at the receptionist at the front desk of the small, private hospital while the rest of the staff looked on in fear and dismay. “In about two minutes a friend of mine is going to come through that door.” He paused to indicate the front entrance, keeping his gun trained on the young woman now fighting tears. “Once he’s inside you’re going to lock this place down: nobody in, nobody out, and if I hear one police siren I start killing hostages.”

“Who’s your friend?” asked the ER Director, a particularly stalwart lady who now stood between Cold and the majority of the ER doctors.

“Your newest patient,” Cold explained. “He’s very important to me, so I want the best doctors you have in this place doing their best work on him. You fix what’s wrong with him and you sew him up, nothing more and nothing less, and if I don’t think you’re doing everything you can there will be consequences.”

No one needed to ask what those consequences would be.

The appearance of ice creeping down the hallway opposite the door heralded the arrival of Captain Cold’s sister, Golden Glider, who skated around the corner dragging the last of the orderlies. He’d tried to make a go for the back door, the coward, but he was no match for her speed on those skates, and now he looked dizzy and disoriented as he slid limply behind her on the ice she left in her wake. She shoved him into the waiting room with the others, then locked the door and skated over to stand beside her brother, looking angry and impatient.

“Where are they?” she hissed, looking between Cold and the door.

“They’ll be here,” Cold told her firmly, then turned to the Director. “In case you were wondering that would be your cue to get a gurney ready.”

For a moment the Director merely glared, but then she signaled to one of the nurses behind her and immediately a gurney was being brought out. They might be under duress, but they’d all sworn an oath.

A few moments later the front door was abruptly thrown open, and in marched a very agitated Heatwave. He wasn’t the patient though; clutched in his arms was a short, small young man with shoulder-length dark hair falling around his ashen face. His shirt was soaked in blood, the source of which looked to be somewhere around his midsection.

His eyes were closed.

Glider made a distressed noise as she took in the sight of him, and her brother looked grim as Heatwave laid the kid onto the waiting gurney. Cold turned to the front entrance and blasted the seam where the double doors came together with his gun, sealing them closed with a thick layer of ice.

“Your … friend’s injuries are severe,” said the Director as three terrified doctors immediately went to work. “I don’t know how much we’re going to be able to do. If he dies-”

“He’s a fighter,” growled Heatwave menacingly, pointing his gun at her.

Cold held up a hand, and Heatwave lowered his weapon but continued to glare.

“He’s right,” Cold informed her more evenly, “the kid’s tough, he’ll pull through. _If_ he’s given proper treatment.”

“We’ll do everything we can,” the Director assured him bitterly.

“For your sake you had better,” Cold replied, “because if he doesn’t make it I don’t care what went wrong or whose fault it was. His life is worth more to me than all of yours combined, so _all_  of your lives are forfeit if we lose him.”

He raised his gun demonstratively. “Any questions?”

“Just what name to put on the chart,” said the Director sourly.

The ghost of a smirk crossed Cold’s face. “Put down Psychotech,” he instructed. 

‘Psychotech’ had suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the abdomen, and apparently lost a lot of blood. There were no exit wounds, meaning that the bullets were still inside, and neither Captain Cold nor any of his gang could say how many there were. The only thing the ER doctors could do was stabilize him; what he needed now was a surgeon.

“He needs to be operated on,” the Director explained, as patiently as could be expected.

“I figured,” said Cold dryly.

“That means we have to move him to an OR,” she continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “None of you will be able to go in with him, unless you wanna scrub up.”

Golden Glider drifted forward without needing any signal from Captain Cold. “I’d be happy to,” she said, smiling sardonically.

She did scrub up, putting the gown over her orange ice-skating costume, although the effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that she insisted on bringing a weapon in with her. It was some kind of gun, though it was hardly recognizable as such; it had no less than three barrels, a rather inordinate amount of space for the inner workings, and a large and complicated looking dial on one side. The Director went into the OR with her, while Captain Cold and Heatwave remained in the observation room. Curiously Glider put the gun down on a nearby table as soon as the room was closed off, and made no move to threaten anyone with it.

“Is that really necessary?” the Director asked as the surgery commenced, nodding at the weapon.

“It’s best that it stays here,” Glider replied condescendingly, “and I wouldn’t get any bright ideas about trying to steal it if I were you. That’s Psychotech’s gun, only he knows how it works; not even my brother can use it safely without him.”

“Where’s your gun then?” the Director frowned in confusion.

Glider smirked. “He made me one,” she explained, “called it the Gold Gun: it shoots a toxic adhesive that looks like molten gold. I usually leave it at home though.”

She lifted one hand, showing off the claw-like golden nails, and caressed the gold necklace at her throat. “I have other toys to play with.”

Not just a necklace then.

In the observation room Cold was completely still, gun trained on the receptionist that he had by the arm and eyes trained on the kid. His expression was unreadable, but he certainly wasn’t pleased. Heatwave, on the other hand, wasn’t so hard to parse out. He was pacing the room like a caged animal, throwing occasional looks through the window into the OR but otherwise just glaring angrily at everything and everyone. Cold only glanced at him once, then went back to watching the surgery.

Finally Heatwave lost patience. Seizing one of the other doctors that had been dragged into the observation room by the front of the shirt he growled, “What’s taking so long?”

“Calm down,” Cold ordered firmly, without moving or looking away from the window. “We still need them.”

Heatwave rumbled in response but made no move to release his captive.

The woman in his grasp swallowed thickly. “They’re trying to be as careful as possible,” she explained. “They don’t want any complications. They’re trying not to let your friend die.”

“They had better not!” he snarled, slamming her up against the wall so she whimpered fearfully.

“They wouldn’t do that,” said Cold, smirking in a somewhat patronizing manner. “They all went to college after all; they’re too smart to make such a dumb move. They won’t let anything go wrong.”

As if on cue, the kid on the table flatlined.

One of the doctors, a scrawny young man who’d only been hired a month ago, screamed and collapsed to the floor. He crawled away from the table backwards, sobbing, as the other surgeons reshuffled to cover his position and get the defibrillators out at the same time. Golden Glider went rigid but held her position, likely knowing that if she were to move closer she’d only be in the way, and her two partners in the observation room dragged their hostages over to the window for a better view.

“Clear!” yelled the lead surgeon, and the kid convulsed as electricity jolted through his heart. It didn’t restart though, so the man signaled for an increase in voltage for the next charge.

“Clear!” he called again, and this time when the kid jerked off the table the monitors went back to beeping rhythmically.

In the observation room, both Captain Cold and Heatwave let out an audible sigh. Cold gestured to the doctor still in his partner’s grasp, and Heatwave threw her bodily at the nearby sink.

“Scrub up,” Cold instructed. “They need an extra pair of hands in there.”

Inside the OR, Golden Glider pulled the necklace from around her neck with a sharp jerk.

“Catch,” she called to the surgeon who had collapsed, now backed up against the wall and crying softly. He caught her underhand toss easily, then stared at the piece of jewelry in his hand in confusion.

Then, it exploded.

Everyone in the OR jumped, and a few of the nurses screamed. Blood and flesh went in all directions, splattering everything and everyone, though Glider herself stood well enough back that it only speckled her gown. Where previously there had been a promising young doctor now suddenly there was merely a large splatter of blood, beneath which lay two disembodied legs. One of them twitched faintly. A nurse began to sob.

“Let that be a lesson,” said Captain Cold’s voice through the speaker connecting to the observation room. “We don’t have time for anyone to lose their cool. Now is not the time to be rethinking your chosen profession, so keep working.”

Everyone continued to work, even the crying nurse who was subtly shuffled over to the task of wiping sweat off the lead surgeon’s forehead. He was sweating a lot.

“Let me help,” piped up the Director, stepping forward, but she stopped when she felt Golden Glider’s sharp nails digging into her neck.

“I don’t think so,” said Glider, exerting just enough pressure to make the Director step back and away from the table. “Why don’t you just stay right here with me.”

It took just over two hours to finish the surgery, and fresh blood had to be brought in twice because the kid was bleeding out too fast. The extra surgeon who scrubbed in at Cold’s insistence helped, but no less than eight bullets had to be pulled out of the kid and they found an exit wound they hadn’t noticed before, meaning that nine bullets total had ripped through his internal organs. Thankfully he didn’t flatline again, but Heatwave grew ever more impatient until Cold threatened to send him out to do a perimeter check, at which point he settled into sulky glaring.

Eventually though, they were sewing the kid up.

“Done,” pronounced the lead surgeon, removing his mask and stripping off his gloves. “Get him to recovery.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Cold informed him, striding carelessly into the room with Heatwave on his heels. “Wake him up.”

“What?” demanded the surgeon. “No, he’ll be in terrible pain!”

“Then give him something for the pain and then wake him up,” Cold instructed as though he were talking to a particularly slow child. “We’re getting out of here.”

“You can’t move him,” piped up one of the nurses, pushing past the surgeon to stand between Cold and her patient. The kid might have been strong enough to get this far, but he was still in critical condition. First and foremost this boy was her patient, her charge, and the gleam in her eye said she wouldn’t allow some criminal to endanger him.

Her bravado faded when suddenly she found herself staring down the barrel of the Cold Gun.

“ _Don’t_ tell me what I can and can’t do,” Cold warned. “Now wake. Him. Up.”

“He’s going to rip his stitches,” she protested, even as another nurse began pushing the drugs that would bring the poor kid back to a painful consciousness. “He still needs treatment, he can’t just go back to a house with no medical staff; he needs a doctor to do post-op, or at least a nurse.”

At this Cold paused, looking at her contemplatively for a moment. “Fine,” he said at last, “you come too.”

“What?” the nurse squeaked, then let out a little cry of pain when Heatwave grabbed her roughly by the upper arm.

“No!” interjected the Director, still immobile on Golden Glider’s likely-poisoned grip but unwilling to remain passive none the less. “There’s no way I’m letting you take one of my people out of here!”

“Then I suppose it’s a good thing I wasn’t asking,” Cold replied, looking entirely unconcerned.

The Director opened her mouth to argue, but the conversation was brought to a halt when the kid on the table made a soft, pained noise.

“Kid!” Heatwave shouted, shoving the nurse at Cold, who caught her easily despite the fact that all his attention was taken by her patient. 

The kid stirred, shifted, and opened his eyes. “Lisa?” he asked hoarsely, looking blearily around.

“I’m here baby,” Glider cooed, shoving the Director out of her way in her haste to go to him. She grabbed the over-complicated gun and laid it in the bed beside him, but he reached for her and she bent over him, laying a soft kiss on his slack mouth.

“Welcome back kid,” said Heatwave in his deep, gruff voice, smiling almost fondly from the other side of the bed.

Captain Cold pulled on the nurse’s upper arm, his Cold Gun aimed at her throat. “Time to go,” he announced to the other three.

“Not so fast,” said the ER Director, abruptly drawing the attention of the entire room. The moment she’d been released she had immediately crossed to the door, and now they could see that her thumb was pressed to a button on the wall.

“Quarantine protocol,” she explained viciously. “The police will be here in less than a minute to lock this place down.”

Heatwave growled, aiming his gun at her, and Golden Glider hissed.

Cold smirked. “Actually it’ll take them about three and a half minutes,” he explained casually, “but I would like you to know that all the blood that spills between now and then will be on your hands.”

“I’m not letting you out of here with one of my people,” she insisted.

From somewhere behind Cold there came a noise faintly reminiscent of a child’s toy gun, and something that looked like a laser pointer hit the Director abruptly in the stomach. She stumbled back a step, like it had gently nudged her, but otherwise seemed unhurt. She looked down at her midriff, confused, and for a moment absolutely nothing happened.

Then a soft red glow began to emanate from her stomach. It shone through her blouse like the heating element of an old electric stove, and suddenly she let out a squeaking little whimper, like she was in pain. She clutched at her stomach, clawing at it as though to pull out whatever was inside her, but she didn’t get the chance to draw blood. The light in her belly pulsed and she threw back her head and screamed, and then with a deafening  _bang_  she exploded in a burst of white-hot flame.

Unlike the man who had been blown up by Golden Glider’s necklace, there was neither a bloodstain nor any pieces left behind. There was only a large black soot mark, and the two doctors who had been closest to her were now lying dead on the floor, their front halves burned and blackened pulps. The entire room turned to look behind Cold, where the blast seemed to have come from, to find that the kid was sitting up in bed, gun in hand and pointing at the place where the Director had just been standing.

“ _Bitch_ ,” Psychotech spat viciously, then turned plaintive eyes on Captain Cold. “Len,” he whined, head lolling onto Glider’s shoulder, “I don’t think I can walk.”

“That’s okay kid,” Cold assured him, smiling an actual, genuine smile that was somehow even more frightening that his cruel smirk.

Heatwave immediately bent over the operating table. “Arms around my neck,” he instructed, and when Psychotech complied, the tri-barreled gun ending up somewhere over Heatwave’s shoulder, he put one arm under the younger man’s knees and lifted him as easily as if he weighed nothing.

Cold led the way out of the hospital, the nurse held out in front of him and his sister bringing up the end of the procession. They made their way to the back of the building, where the loading bay for the ambulances was, and they all piled into the back of one with Psychotech laid on the stretcher inside. Glider went to the driver’s side door and hurriedly took off her skates, then climbed into the cab barefoot and tossed them into the passenger seat before turning on the siren.

The police cars began pulling up to the hospital just as it was disappearing in the rearview mirror.

“How you feeling kid?” asked Cold once they were far enough away that Glider turned off the siren.

“Less dead than the last time I checked,” Psychotech replied, smiling lazily. “Thanks for that by the way.”

“As if I’d let you die,” said Cold, then grinned. “Lisa would get mad.”

“Aw,” Psychotech pouted. “After everything we’ve been through together, she’s still the only thing that matters.”

“Not true,” the older criminal countered, reaching out a hand to brush his young partner’s hair out of his face. “You matter.”

“I must be in bad shape,” Psycotech giggled, “if you’re getting all sentimental on me.”

“You’re gonna be fine kid,” Heatwave rumbled, and his smile was oddly genuine as well. “We all like you too much to let you go that easily.”

“Hey,” Golden Glider called cheekily from the front seat, “that’s _my_  boytoy you’re hitting on Mick.”

“Aw baby,” Psychotech called back, leaning his head backwards as he strained to get a glimpse of her, “you know it’s all for you.”

“Doesn’t mean she can’t share,” Cold protested lightly. As though in demonstration he placed one finger lightly on Psychotech’s lips, and the kid took it immediately into his mouth, sucking on the tip and batting his eyes flirtatiously.

Captain Cold and Heatwave both laughed. “Don’t start something you’re not going to finish now,” Cold warned him, still smiling as he drew back his hand.

Psychotech plucked at his ruined shirt in order to indicate his stitched-up abdomen. “Raincheck?” he asked innocently.

Cold smiled. “You know it.”

After that though, Psychotech’s face fell. He looked down at his stomach, at the dried blood on his shirt, which had had to be cut up the middle and pulled aside. His stitches were clearly visible between the flaps, and there were a lot of them. When this was over his belly would be covered in scars.

“Are you in pain?” Cold asked, eyes flicking pointedly to the nurse, who whimpered slightly and huddled down into the corner they’d stuck her in.

“No,” Psychotech replied softly. “I just …”

“What?” Heatwave rasped, impatient but without any trace of anger.

Psychotech looked back and forth between the two criminals, then turned his attention to Cold. “I’m sorry I got shot,” he said quietly.

“Not as sorry as the cop who shot you,” Heatwave growled, showing teeth.

“Oh kid,” said Cold softly, reaching down to caress Psychotech’s face. “You know you’re more than worth the trouble.”

“We’re family,” Glider piped up over her shoulder.

“Family,” Psychotech repeated, nuzzling into Captain Cold’s touch. “Yeah. Family.”


End file.
